along with covert operations that some equate to war in places like pakistan yemen and somalia so here to talk about all of this going on and what we really need to be focusing on is below and she is foreign policy analyst at the cato institute thank you for being here so i think you now i know that this is something that you focus on when you travel to pakistan and you travel to afghanistan as well i'm curious how you read the violence that we've seen recently against u.s. officials statements because today we have an attack by the taliban the u.n. put out numbers saying that violence and afghan casualties have increased in the first six months of this year to two very high levels to i think record highs there increased sharply and then this kind of seems to contradict what u.s. officials have said you have betrayed us before he went out saying that you know violence is on the decline and you had obama saying the taliban is broken is the situation getting better or worse there i think the problem in interestingly enough general petraeus actually called these gains that we've seen in t